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Posts Tagged ‘king james bible’

Christmas Eve

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 24, 2024| 2 Comments »

Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.

This is my favorite version of the Christmas story. There may be more-accurate translations of the original, but none that sounds as lovely to me or has as many associations with my younger years, when we memorized Bible verses in school.

“And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

“(And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

“And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

“And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

“To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

“And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.”

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Imagine Being this Astonished Professor

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 15, 2015| 2 Comments »

In case you’ve ever wondered why anyone would become a scholar and spend life mired in musty, dark library stacks, let me introduce you to an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

“In an unassuming notebook held in an archive at the University of Cambridge,” writes Jennifer Schuessler at the NY Times, “an American scholar has found what he says is an important new clue to the earthly processes behind that masterpiece [the King James Bible]: the earliest known draft, and the only one definitively written in the hand of one of the roughly four dozen translators who worked on it.

“The notebook, which dates from 1604 to 1608, was discovered by Jeffrey Alan Miller, an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey, … last fall, when he was in the archives at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, researching an essay about Samuel Ward, one of the King James translators and, later, the college’s master. He was hoping to find an unknown letter, which he did.

“ ‘I thought that would be my great discovery,’ he recalled.

“But he also came across an unassuming notebook about the size of a modern paperback, wrapped in a stained piece of waste vellum and filled with some 70 pages of Ward’s nearly indecipherable handwriting.

“The notebook had been cataloged in the 1980s as a ‘verse-by-verse biblical commentary’ with ‘Greek word studies, and some Hebrew notes.’ But as Professor Miller tried to puzzle out which passages of the Bible it concerned, he realized what it was: a draft of parts of the King James Version of the Apocrypha, a disputed section of the Bible that is left out of many editions, particularly in the United States.

” ‘There was a kind of thunderstruck, leap-out-of-bathtub moment,’ Professor Miller said. ‘But then comes the more laborious process of making sure you are 100 percent correct.’ ” More here.

Photo: Maria Anna Rogers/Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
Pages from Samuel Ward’s translation for part of the King James Bible, the earliest known draft for the King James translation, which appeared in 1611.

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